June 4, 2007
Thank You for Smoking III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:40 AM EST A small quibble with John Steele Gordon’s post on smoking. Mr. Gordon writes that “Franklin Roosevelt (dead of a stroke at 63) was the last President to smoke in public.” I’m not sure that’s correct. Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson smoked to one degree or another. All three men were more discreet than FDR about being photographed with tobacco products in hand, though at least in the case of LBJ, there is extant footage of the President with a lit cigarette. Gerald Ford, however, made little pretense about his habit. He was frequently caught on camera with a lit pipe. I’m not sure whether the MPAA’s new guidelines apply only to cigarettes or to cigars and pipes as well, but it’s probably more accurate to identify Gerald Ford as the last unabashed smoker to occupy the West Wing. Ironically, he lived longer than his predecessors. Maybe it had something to do with golf. Mr. Gordon speculates that while movies may have encouraged past youth generations to take up smoking, today’s teens are savvier about media imagery. I think Mr. Gordon is a little hard on those young people with (his words, not mine) “rings in their noses and their hair dyed puce. One suspects a certain insufficiency of parental authority, not coolness.” In my limited experience as a college instructor, I’ve found that many such young people, in addition to being very bright and respectful, are non-smoking vegans. Why fault them for what Mr. Gordon and I probably agree is a tragic fashion error? (They surely wouldn’t think much of our apparel decisions either.) I’ve also found that many of my straight-laced, button-downed students are chain smokers. It’s hard to go on appearances alone. Whether today’s youth generation is driven by media imagery, I don’t know. Presumably there are many studies on precisely this question. Historically, the first generation of American filmgoers claimed to be very much under the influence of their favorite Hollywood stars. In the 1920s the Payne Fund conducted a survey of teenagers and college students in Chicago and found that most respondents freely admitted to imitating what they saw on the silver screen. “I believe that watching the actions of people in the movies (the actors I mean) have led me to take up drinking and smoking,” confessed a male undergraduate at the University of Chicago. “I sort of got the desire to smoke from watching some actor inhale a cigarette.” Another undergrad admitted that by watching romance films, he was able to give “considerable . . . attention” to the “technique of making love to a girl. . . . I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the mouth, in a close huddle.” It wasn’t just the young men who found their passions roused and techniques improved by the motion picture shows. Young women claimed to learn from their favorite onscreen flappers when to close their eyes during a kiss. “After I see a love picture,” a 16-year-old high school junior confessed, “it just leaves me rather dopey. I always try to imagine myself in a like situation. Instead of making me feel like going out on a party with some men, I generally feel more ready to be loved. . . . The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex.” Furthermore, a study of delinquent girls in the late 1920s revealed that three quarters of them tried to boost their sex appeal by mimicking the way onscreen stars dressed, applied makeup, and fixed their hair. What this says about today is anyone’s guess.
|
